Teaching English as a lingua franca in Turkey: An autoethnographic study

This dissertation aims to explore the processes of ELF teaching and its applicability in a Turkish norm-based context. The significance of the study lies in its effort to produce ELF activities, to implement them in a classroom, and to reveal its aspects. This effort could shed light on the need for bridging the theory-practice gap in the ELF literature. As this study is an autoethnography, the main data source was the researcher. The study also included supporting participants in order to explore the issue from different perspectives. The study was conducted at an elementary level preparatory classroom in a state university. The researcher prepared 13 ELF activities and implemented them as extracurricular activities. The data regarding ELF materials development and classroom application gathered via researcher journal, activity reflection logs, and the recordings of the classroom sessions. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted with 12 students and 16 instructors to get their views about contextual factors, ELF, and ELF materials. All data was analyzed by thematic analysis. The findings of the study show that ELF materials development was challenging due to the challenge of moving from theory to practice. Moreover, developing ELF materials was time-consuming due to searching for appropriate sources such as audiovisuals on the internet and the need for their adaptation to classroom use. The findings regarding the classroom application show that time-constraint was a challenge in the context. Besides, during the implementation process, the researcher came to several significant realizations that needed consideration such as the need for teacher's content knowledge, increase in L1 use, students' becoming informed rather than aware, the teachability of ELF. The findings also indicate that students voiced several negative views about the activities such as difficulty to comprehend, speech rate, engaging function, and usefulness. Some materials had drawbacks such as the exposure quantity, length and difficulty of the sources used. However, the findings also indicate that there were also positive aspects. The students' views were dominantly positive about the activities regarding their engaging and informative function, affective factor and contribution to language learning. Besides, the materials had positive aspects, their content's effect on student engagement and promoting critical thinking. The findings also show that the ELF applicability could be challenged by institutional factors, lack of ELF awareness, student profile, and lack of ELF perspective in teaching materials. However, the instructors' and students' support for ELF could be viewed as opportunities for EFL applicability. Keywords: English language teaching, ELF application, elementary level, autoethnography.